Natural Law

Harry Jaffa

Harry Jaffa was a Straussian conservative philosopher who reinterpreted Lincoln and the American Founding as a principled defense of natural right, shaping the West Coast school that still informs the intellectual right

Harriet Tubman

1822–1913

Harriet Tubman was an abolitionist who escaped slavery and led some 70 enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad, later serving as a Union spy and supporting women's suffrage

Aristotle

384–322 BCE

Aristotle was the ancient Greek founder of political science, grounding politics in the conviction that humans are by nature political animals who flourish only in community

Marcus Tullius Cicero

106–43 BCE

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman and defender of the Republic whose synthesis of Greek philosophy and Roman civic life became one of the most influential models of republican political thought in the West

Frederick Douglass

1818–1895

Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist and natural-rights political philosopher who read the Constitution as an anti-slavery document and became the most influential African American intellectual of the 19th century

John Calvin

1509–1564

John Calvin was the most politically consequential Protestant Reformer, whose theology of resistance, vocation, and godly civil government shaped Puritan England, colonial America, and the modern Protestant world

Lysander Spooner

1808–1887

Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist and individualist anarchist whose case against slavery and the Constitution's authority founded the tradition running through Rothbard to anarcho-capitalism

Thomas Aquinas

1225–1274

Thomas Aquinas was the medieval Dominican friar who synthesized Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy and built the natural law tradition that still anchors Catholic political thought

Abraham Lincoln

1809–1865

Abraham Lincoln was the antislavery president whose arguments about consent, equality, and the meaning of the founding remain the deepest engagement with American democratic theory ever produced

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968

Martin Luther King Jr. was the minister and political philosopher who fused Gandhian nonviolence, Christian personalism, and American democratic ideals into the most morally serious political movement of the twentieth century

Hugo Grotius

1583–1645

Hugo Grotius was the Dutch natural-law jurist called the father of international law, whose On the Law of War and Peace grounded rights and obligations in reason for a Europe fractured by religious war

César Chávez

1927–1993

César Chávez was a nonviolent labor leader who combined union organizing with civil rights activism and Catholic social teaching to win contracts and legal protections for America’s farm workers

Eleanor Roosevelt

1884–1962

Eleanor Roosevelt was a Democratic champion of civil and human rights who remade the First Ladyship into a political force and chaired the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Rosa Parks

1913–2005

Rosa Parks was a trained civil rights activist whose deliberate refusal to give up her Montgomery bus seat sparked the boycott that launched the modern civil rights struggle

C.S. Lewis

1898–1963

Christian apologist, Narnia author, moral law

Walter Rauschenbusch

1861–1918

Walter Rauschenbusch was the Baptist founder of the Social Gospel, whose eleven years in Hell's Kitchen convinced him that poverty was structural rather than spiritual — and that the church was obliged to say so

Joseph de Maistre

1753–1821

Joseph de Maistre was the godfather of European counter-revolutionary thought, arguing that the French Revolution proved liberalism false and that tradition, faith, and the executioner were the real foundations of order

Dorothy Day

1897–1980

Dorothy Day was a radical Catholic pacifist whose Catholic Worker movement fed the hungry, housed the homeless, and refused any distinction between personal holiness and political transformation

Marcus Aurelius

121–180

Marcus Aurelius was Rome's Stoic philosopher-emperor, ruling the most powerful state in the world while writing a private journal on how to live well — the Meditations, among the most widely read texts in human history

Martin Luther

1483–1546

Martin Luther was the Augustinian monk whose protest against indulgences fractured Western Christendom and whose insistence on conscience over ecclesiastical authority set the terms of political debate for centuries

Russell Kirk

1918–1994

Russell Kirk was the traditionalist conservative who gave the postwar American right its intellectual soul, defending tradition, order, and the permanent things against modern ideological abstraction

Mahatma Gandhi

1869–1948

Mahatma Gandhi was the Indian independence leader who transformed nonviolent resistance from a personal moral stance into a systematic political philosophy — and demonstrated that it could defeat an empire